Country of Old Men Page 3

  “It wasn’t his fault this time,” he said.

  “You ought to teach him his address and telephone number,” Leppard said. “And his last name. Gruber?” He looked at Zach. “Your father’s last name is Gruber. His full name is Len Gruber. That means your name is Zach Gruber. Now, you’re a big enough boy to remember that, aren’t you?”

  Zach pushed at a crushed cigarette pack with his foot.

  Tessa Gruber frowned at Dave. “What do you mean, it wasn’t his fault?”

  “He didn’t go on his own,” Dave said. “Someone took him.”

  Leppard said, “There was a shooting here last night.” He pointed with a thumb toward the breezeway. “There.”

  She looked and saw the chalk marks on the ground and winced. “I didn’t know. I work nights.” She looked anxiously at her watch. “And I’m going to be late if I don’t get moving. Listen, thanks for finding him.” She grabbed Zach’s arm roughly and started off with him. “I’ve been out looking for you since breakfast.”

  Leppard walked after her. “We found him at the beach. Malibu.” That stopped Tessa. She turned back, surprised. Zach skipped off out of sight. Leppard went on, “A young woman neighbor of yours took Zach down there. After the shooting. He came running here when he heard the shots and he saw her. Her name is Rachel Klein. Zach seems to know her. What about you? Apartment one-oh-seven-two.”

  She shook her head. Quickly. Maybe too quickly. “Never heard of her. There’s a lot of apartments in this place, lot of people. Most of them I’ve never even seen.”

  “You don’t seem very curious,” Dave said.

  “About what?” she said. “If I don’t get to Shadows by four, Mr. Zinneman could fire me. Then there’ll be two of us out of work. What will we eat on? How’ll we pay the God damn fantasy land rent here? Zach, where are you? I haven’t got time to be curious. What am I supposed to be curious about?”

  “About who was shot,” Dave said.

  She snorted. “People get shot in this neighborhood all the time. It was bound to happen inside here sooner or later. Management won’t fix the outdoor lighting. It’s drugs, isn’t it? He was a crack dealer, right?”

  “Right,” Leppard said. “Name of Cricket Shales.”

  Dave thought he saw fright in her eyes, but her face was blank, and she said in the steadiest of voices, “Never heard of him. Weird name. Look, I really gotta go now. Zach, you come here, right now.” Zach came, dragging his feet. “We’ll trail along,” Leppard said. “Your husband home?” She glanced wryly over her shoulder as she prodded Zach ahead of her. “You think he’d help me look for the kid? He’s got television to watch. He didn’t watch television”—she climbed stairs—“it would go out of business, wouldn’t it?” She zigzagged past beach balls and spider bikes and skateboards along a balcony to a door she flung open. She pushed Zach inside. “You know where he was? At the fucking beach. Cops brought him home.” Dave and Leppard went along the gallery after her. They heard her say, “No, Len, not now. They’re right behind me. They want to talk to you. I gotta get ready for work.” An inner door banged. Leppard and Dave stepped into a blank-walled room of meaningless furniture and lamps where a muscular, unshaven young man in ragged jeans sat in an easy chair with a beer can and a bag of potato chips, and stared at a noisy television set. The images were of men shooting at each other in a warehouse.

  Leppard picked up the remote control from the chair arm and switched off the set. “Your son was kidnapped, Mr. Gruber. By a young woman who lives in these buildings. Her name is Rachel Klein. Do you know her?”

  Gruber reached for the remote in Leppard’s hand. “Give me that. You got no right—”

  Leppard dropped the remote into his jacket pocket. It was a stunning jacket. The tweed was woven in some tumbledown cottage in the Scots highlands, seeds and grasses still caught in the wool. “I’d like to hear your answers.”

  “Hell, I didn’t do nothin’. Ask this Ruby Shine.”

  “Rachel Klein. We can’t find her. Where is she?”

  “How the hell would I know? I never heard of her.”

  “Zach knows her. Young, attractive? A neighbor?”

  “Look—I don’t chase women, okay? I got a wife other men would kill themselves to get. And I’d kill them if they tried. I don’t chase women.” He squinted at Leppard. “What did she kidnap Zach for? Shit, we haven’t got any money.”

  “He was a witness,” Leppard said. “Your wife was at work. Where were you last night?”

  Gruber straightened up in the chair. His feet, bare, the soles dirty, had been up on an ottoman. He put them on the floor. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Only that there was a shooting out there.” Leppard jerked his head. “That’s what Zach was a witness to. I wondered if you heard the shots.”

  “I didn’t hear nothin’. What time?”

  “Preliminary medical report puts it at midnight.”

  “Midnight?” Gruber laughed. “I was in bed asleep. All right, passed out. Three six-packs. Tessa says I’m turning into a pig. Sweet talk, right? Hell, you try being without a job for five months. A man loses his self-respect. I drink too much. That’s my problem.” He put the fascinating subject of himself aside and woke up to what Leppard had said. “Preliminary medical? That don’t mean a shooting. That means the guy was killed, don’t it?”

  “Who said it was a guy?” Leppard asked.

  “Oh, Christ.” Gruber made a face. “All right. The woman, then. Whoever it is, they’re dead, right?”

  Leppard nodded. “Cricket Shales. You know him?”

  Gruber slumped quickly back in the chair again. “No.” Without looking at Leppard, he stretched out a hand to him. “Now, can I have my remote back, officer, please, sir?”

  “What’s wrong with you, Gruber? Your son was kidnapped. Where’s your humanity? You didn’t even report him missing.”

  Gruber blinked at him. “He’s back. He’s okay. What do you want from me?”

  Dave said, “That bruise on his face doesn’t worry you?”

  Gruber shrugged. “Dame probably hit him. He can get on your nerves.”

  “Hit him yourself, sometimes, do you?” Dave said.

  Gruber glanced at him. “You got any kids?”

  “No,” Dave said.

  “I didn’t think so,” Gruber said, “or you wouldn’t ask.”

  Leppard said, “Where’d he go now?” and left the room.

  “How the hell do I know?” Gruber got up, stepped to the television set, and switched it on. On the tube, a dog in the back of a parked pickup truck was looking longingly into the bed of the red pickup truck parked next to it. At last, the dog hopped from his truck into the new one. Of a different brand, of course. Dave wondered if the message was “Let your dog choose your next truck.” Voices reached him.

  Tessa Gruber yelped, “Where are you taking him?”

  “Downtown,” Leppard answered, “to police headquarters.”

  “You can’t,” she said. “Zach, come here.”

  Zach didn’t do that. He came into the living room, hanging onto Leppard’s hand. She came after them. She’d put on a black cocktail waitress’s outfit, very short skirt, net stockings. She had good legs. She shrilled at Gruber, “You going to let them do this?”

  “I guess they want a medic to check him out.” Gruber stared at the television set. “See if he’s okay. They do that after kidnappings.” He took up his beer can and gulped from it. “It’s routine, Tessa. You’d know stuff like that if you ever watched the news.”

  “Well, you go with them,” she said.

  “Come on,” he protested. “What for?”

  “Because I can’t go, stupid. I gotta get to work.”

  Leppard passed the remote back to Gruber and went with Zach by the hand to the front door. “He’ll be all right.” Dave opened the door and stepped onto the gallery. Leppard did this, too, then turned back to say, “But don’t take any trips, Mr. Gruber, please. We may want to t
alk to you later.” He started off along the gallery. “Get off my case,” Gruber said. “I got enough trouble.”

  “Wait.” Tessa trotted after them. “How long you going to keep him? When’ll you bring him back?”

  “Do you really give a damn?” Leppard said.

  “What? I looked for him all day. I told you.”

  “Maybe, but you didn’t report him missing,” Leppard said. “The juvenile authorities are going to hold that against you.” He sighed regretfully and, wagging his round, sleek head, he started off again, making for the stairs. “They may not ever let me bring him back.”

  She didn’t grab for Zach, go for Leppard with her nails, or wail, or curse. She just stood and watched them go. When Dave halted on the far side of the patio below, and looked back, she was still up there in her sleazy, sexy costume, gazing at them mutely and without expression.

  He said to Leppard, “Bible student, are you?”

  Leppard chuckled and led Zach toward the street. “You talking about King Solomon?”

  “He somehow leaps to mind,” Dave said.

  4

  THE TOYLAND SCHOOL WAS on Venice near La Cienega—flat-roofed, pale green stucco buildings, construction-paper daffodils Cellotaped inside the windows. Outside in a gravel play yard stood a short chute, swings, a jungle gym to climb on, a steel barrel to crawl through, a little train with two cars behind it on a circle of track, all these things painted bright red, blue, yellow, green. A high chain-link fence enclosed the yard. The latch on the gate was up out of the reach of small fry. And when Dave walked up to it, a young Asian woman in jeans, a blouse, a cardigan, was standing on tiptoe, stretching her arms to put a padlock in the latch.

  He asked, “May I help?”

  She was startled for a second. It wasn’t a spot where you’d expect passersby on foot. The sidewalk never got used. Here in front of the school it was swept—but along Venice in both directions nobody had paid any attention to it for some time. Warehouses, an auto repair shop, a screen-door maker, a sign painter—clean sidewalks didn’t affect their profits. She blinked up at him through blue-rimmed glasses, studying him, her head tilted. It appeared he passed muster. She smiled and put the lock into his hand. “Please. I’d be grateful.” She stepped aside. “It’s a nuisance to be so short. If I’d been born here, it would be different. Now, in Japan the children are growing up on hamburgers and pizzas, and they’ll all be tall as Americans.”

  Fastening the padlock, Dave started to cite the caterpillar in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland who indignantly claimed that two inches was quite a good height, indeed, then thought better of it. “My name is Brandstetter.” He took from his inside jacket pocket the ostrich-hide folder that held his private investigator’s license, and showed it to her. “I’m working with the police. The case involves a child who comes here. Zach Gruber.”

  “Oh, dear.” She peered up at him, eyes anxious. “Has anything happened to him? Is he all right?”

  “A lot has happened to him.” Dave put the folder away. “But aside from a bruise on his face, I don’t think he’s hurt.” He glanced at the buildings. “You’re—?”

  “Celia Yamashita,” she said. “It’s my school.”

  Dave said, “A shooting took place at Zach’s apartment complex last night, he saw someone standing over the victim, and that someone saw him and kidnapped him.” The schoolmistress put a hand to her forehead. He said, “Don’t be upset. He got away, a friend of mine scooped him up off the beach and called the police, and he’s safe now—”

  “But doesn’t that explain the bruise?” she said.

  “He claims not, says he fell down earlier, and banged his face. He’s accident-prone. It happens all the time.”

  “‘This is a recorded message,’” she said grimly.

  “He’s come to school battered, has he?”

  “The first time, he claimed he’d fallen down stairs. I phoned his home, couldn’t reach anyone, so I took him to my doctor. He didn’t think it was a fall, but he couldn’t be sure what had happened.”

  “And the second time?” Dave said.

  “He was a sight. He said his mother stopped the car suddenly to avoid a collision, and he banged his face on the glove compartment.” Celia Yamashita glanced at her watch, picked up a shoulder bag from the sidewalk, started away. Dave strolled along beside her. She went on, “This time I thought Child Welfare better know about it. They interviewed Zach and then they talked to the parents. Nothing. The neighbors couldn’t contribute anything. That Mr. Gruber drinks and gets loud and verbally abusive sometimes and she screams at him—nothing about child abuse.”

  “But you’re not convinced?” Dave said.

  She threw him a glum smile. “I’m not convinced. And neither are you, Mr. Brandstetter, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “Does he fall asleep a lot during the days?”

  She cocked her head. “How did you know?”

  “He seems to spend his nights wandering around the apartment complex, and he keeps saying there are good hiding places there. But he won’t say why that’s important to him—who it is he wants to hide from.”

  “He keeps things to himself.”

  “Frightened into silence?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.” They’d gone down a gritty alley of abandoned auto carcasses. Behind the school, she unlocked a Japanese economy car. “And something else. He never cries. All the children have little mishaps. If he hurts himself, or someone hurts him—not a sound, not a tear. So, whatever the neighbors say, I think his father abuses him and threatens him with worse if he cries, so of course, no one hears.” Celia Yamashita tossed her bag into the car. “As for his mother—well, what can you say? She’s a waitress at a cocktail bar. They’re”—she blinked into the westering sunlight while she groped for words—“not exactly parenting material, are they?” She got into the little car, slammed the door, peered out at him, worrying the subject some more. “I mean, one day—not long after she first brought Zach here—she sent a man from the bar to pick him up after school. A musician in torn jeans and long hair. Not a responsible-looking person. Very strange eyes. I hated letting him take Zach, really, but she’d phoned ahead. It was an emergency. And Zach seemed to know him and trust him.”

  “A guitarist?” Dave said. “Name of Cricket?”

  She started the car. “That’s the one. Cricket.”

  He reached the canyon house at sunset, dog-tired. This happened to him nowadays. He wasn’t sure why. He was sure he didn’t want to know why. Scarcely noticing the red roadster parked beside him, he climbed out of the Jaguar, locked it, went around the front building into the courtyard sheltered by the old oak—and stopped. The cookshack windows glowed with light. He pulled the screen door, pushed the wooden door, and Amanda smiled at him from the massive old farmhouse stove where she was cooking, wrapped in a yellow apron. Neatly made, not yet forty, pretty and bright and tiny, she was of all unlikely things Dave’s stepmother, Carl Brandstetter’s widow, widow number nine.

  The first, Dave’s mother, was long dead. Dave didn’t remember her. Of the others he’d seen little once Carl had shed them, trailing jewelry, Paris gowns, and money. Most had shown up for the great man’s funeral, a few years back. It had been quite a crowd. How different they’d been from each other. No one could accuse Carl Brandstetter of marrying the same woman over and over again. Quite the reverse. Dave remembered some of them kindly. To most of them, even when he was small and lived at home, he’d been as dim a presence as they’d been to him.

  Young and lovely as she was, and deeply in love with Carl, Amanda might not have lasted, either. In more than seventy years of living, Carl had never got the hang of constancy. But he hadn’t been given time to tire of Amanda. Late one night, only a few short years into their marriage, while driving ninety miles an hour on a freeway, he’d had a heart attack, and totaled his Bentley and himself—and so Amanda became widow of record.

  Lost and forlorn, wandering aimless
through the handsome, heartlessly empty rooms of a sprawling Beverly Hills mansion, Amanda had needed something to do with her time, and Dave had asked her to revamp these shacky stable buildings into livable quarters. She’d done a smart job, and with Madge Dunstan’s seconding, he’d got her to set up in business on Rodeo Drive, where she’d prospered and made a name for herself. Picture spreads of her work had been in all the glossy shelter magazines. More importantly, she’d become Dave’s friend.

  “Dave, I’m so glad.” She opened a massive old oak icebox in which she’d concealed the works of a state-of-the-art refrigerator, and lifted out of it a misty pitcher and a frosty glass. While she poured a martini for him, she said, “Dave Brandstetter, Cliff Callahan.” She meant a giant of a boy who sat on a chair at the big scrubbed deal table in the middle of the room. He rose and held out a huge, very clean hand. His blue eyes twinkled. His voice rumbled from a chest that stretched hell out of the cloth on what ought to have been a roomy shirt. “How are you, Mr. Brandstetter? Good to know you.” He crushed Dave’s hand when he shook it. “Amanda thinks the world of you. She talks about you all the time. We’re going to get married.”

  “This is a surprise,” Dave said to Amanda.

  She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek. “I wanted you to be the first to know, and I didn’t want it to be on the phone. Anyway, your phone is always unplugged. So I took a chance on your being home tonight.” She put the icy glass in his hand. “I was counting on your promise not to sneak out of retirement again.” Her look was suspicious. “You haven’t, have you?”

  Dave sat at the table. “It’s touch and go. I promised Cecil I wouldn’t. I’d like to keep that promise, but—” He shrugged, and sipped the martini. It would probably knock him out. That’s what martinis were doing to him lately. But he wasn’t going to admit this now. Besides, it tasted good. “This is glorious,” he told her. “Thank you.” Very casually, he got up, went to a drawer, took out a pack of Marlboros. Amanda was busy making salad dressing and didn’t notice. He sat down again, quickly opened the pack, lit a cigarette, and was so relieved to have smoke in his lungs once more he almost wept. He sipped the martini and said, “You like children, Mr. Callahan?”